call for abstracts in journal articles.

Hi everyone:
I am new to this newsgroup. I happened to notice that there
seems to be an active participation by the editorial staff of the
publishing enterprise. I want to raise few suggestions regarding the
journal formats. Although molecular biology techniques have been used for
quite some time, recently there seems to be a large flux of small articles
dealing with many important, handy yet not justifying a full article format.
This seems specially so in "popular" journals like BioTechniques.
One problem I have noted in these articles is the lack of an
succint abstract, which goes a long way in helping the reader to get a
gist of the article and save the trouble of reading the entire article
to really find out what is different with the article in question.
This problem becomes specially acute when we are trying to search and
access the articles through Medline and other such sources. Many articles
contain numerous general and vague terms in their titles which makes it
almost impossible to understand the article without reading it in its
entirety.
My suggestion is to require providing the abstract in all the
articles irrespective of their importance. Of course, you as editors
and reviewers can always ensure that the summary actually does convey
the main points of the article. I believe this format improves everyone's
life a lot more.
Thanks for your patience in trying to understand my ramblings
Raj Shankarappa
Univ of Pittsburgh
bsh at med.pitt.edu